Marina Gutierrez is a whirlwind of positive energy that can be both inspiring and intimidating. The New York-based multimedia artist has won numerous awards, residencies, and commissions for her sculptures, drawings, printmaking, videos, and an imagination playground. Marina is also a political, social, and environmental activist who has tackled such issues as genocide, police violence, and the destruction of our oceans and waterways. Additionally, she directs The Saturday Program at Cooper Union, one of the most highly acclaimed arts education programs in the country, which provides free arts classes for more than 200 high school students annually from underserved New York City communities.
The threads that connect Marina’s art-making, activism, and educational initiatives is storytelling. “Life is all about our stories,” Marina says. “I grew up in New York City, where there are layers upon layers of stories that can go back hundreds of years. I listen to people. I hear their stories. I learn about their family and their history. My role as an artist is to uncover stories behind stories, to distill and interpret, to weave historical threads past into present.”
Her 2010 Project Row House installation, Persistence of Site – Tupac/2pakeko, intertwines the story of Túpac Amaru, the last monarch of the Inca Empire, with the story of the late American rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur. In Persistence of Site, we see the story of the Americas as a story of conquest, including the Spanish Conquistadors genocide of indigenous civilizations, and American slavery. But Marina also poses the question, who conquered who? The agricultural products which were cultivated for thousands of years before the Spanish came (potatoes, tomatoes, corn, chocolate, vanilla, peppers, peanuts, and more), now feed two-thirds of the world’s population.
Her 2000 installation, Redrum for Amadu, tells the story of Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant, who was shot and killed by four New York City police officers. The video installation took audiences on a journey through the real-life horror story of the murder and trial by combining video and audio from TV news and Stanely Kubrick’s The Shining.
This past March, Marina co-curated and created a sculpture for Liar’s Couture in Disillusionment: Perspectives Beyond, which featured 24 leading women artists who created works about personal, cultural, political and global disillusionment, including “Me Too” narratives and hurricane reflections. Marina is also collaborating on a video featuring artists from the exhibit.
Tipping Point, her 2008 installation, tells the history of the Hudson River’s tidal estuary through the story of successive migrations of people and plant-life. Her work illustrates the tipping point when invasive species change the delicate balance of the estuary’s ecosystem. It’s a story she tells by decoding the hundreds of invisible languages left by each successive migration.
Water has been a constant theme in Marina’s art and activism. Her 2008 installation and video, EnAquaMemorium3 presents ecological threats to ocean & earth. EnAquaMemoriam1 featured a lunch box sized diorama, engraved with a Latin textual requiem to the ecology of oceans, and metal silhouettes cut from canned fish. “Casita 3” is a floating Caribbean style country house constructed from transparent corrugated fiberglass, cheese cloth, and hair and bark fibers.
“I’ve always lived close to the ocean. It’s a part of who I am. As a kid, I use to ride my bike to the ocean almost every day… I’ve lived in Manhattan and Queens, but Brooklyn is where I really grew up. There was a very tight Puerto Rican community in my neighborhood, which hosted these amazing Puerto Rican day parades. Later there was a strong Dominican community that moved in, but the neighborhood is pretty gentrified now. My family was very artistic. My father was amateur photographer, and my mother worked as a seamstress, but was always doing these very artistic things. We were very self-sufficient. Everyone could fix their own cars.”
Marina earned an M.F.A. from Vermont College, and a B.F.A. from Cooper Union in New York. At Cooper Union, she began serving as a teacher for The Saturday Program, which offers arts comprehensive arts programs to New York City public high school students. With Marina’s background as a community artist, she quickly rose to Director of the 50-year-old organization.
“It’s a big operation,” Marina says. “There are six part-time staff, 18 undergraduate teachers and four teaching artists. We serve over 200 New York City public school students who take classes in drawing, painting, graphic design, sculpture, architecture, sound composition, and portfolio preparation. There is an end-of-the-year student show that is quite extraordinary.”
“A lot of these kids didn’t start out with a background in the arts, but they all have stories to tell, and they take this opportunity very seriously. We are helping to give these kids the skills they need to get into college. More than 85 percent of the kids in this program will go on to college, which is a huge number in comparison to the rest of the New York City Public Schools. And these kids are going on to do great things. They’ve won all sorts of prestigious awards including Guggenheim Fellowships. There of our program staff are former students of the program.”
Marina’s message to emerging artists is to let their activism drive their craft. “The attack on arts and education in this country is not random. They are pulling the money out of the arts and public schools and putting it into private pockets. As artists, we have to resist. Art by necessity is not a passive exercise. Our consumer culture encourages passivity. In creating, artists must generate the original content, and that can inspire others to action.”
To hear more from Marina, check out Exploring Visual Narratives: The Art of Marina Gutierrez, which is part of Jesus Macarena-Avila’s Caribbean Art, Literature, and Music class on Wednesday, October 10, 7 – 9 p.m. in the Columbia Library, 624 S. Michigan Ave., 2nd floor Instruction Room. Co-sponsors include the Columbia Library, the Center for Black Music Research and Columbia’s Humanities, History and Social Sciences Department. Media sponsors are Contratiempo and Illinois Latino Voice.
